So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.

Priests are very interested in theater in New York! It's this lovely reminder that priests are just people, too, who need to be entertained.

There's this unspoken history that exists between any mother and daughter, no matter how deep and loving the bond is, twenty-five years of being raised by someone, there's a kind of deep history which means that there are shortcuts to getting on each other's nerves.

Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.

The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.

I do think it's fascinating to see a play where everybody's sort of, in various ways, uprooted, and you see the older generation, the parents, whose faith has been something concrete that has guided them through a specific set of hurdles and circumstances.

In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.